How Advertising distorts our view of ourselves and the world.

About

My entrepreneurial career started on November 9, 1989 with the fall of the Berlin Wall. At the time, I had been working as an Account Executive at a major New York City ad agency. The events in Berlin inspired me to quit my job and move to Berlin with the idea of opening a T-Shirt shop at Checkpoint Charlie. 6 months later, I was operating a T-Shirt shop at Checkpoint Charlie called “After The Fall.” selling T-Shirts with imprints of Wall Graffiti silkscreened on them to tourists from around the world.

Soon thereafter, I tried my hand in the fast food business, opening an American style hot dog shop in East Berlin called “Mr. Hot Dog.”

My first US startup was an advertising company based in New York called “GoCARD.” This company invented the concept of free postcard advertising. Here’s a video we made in 2006:http://tinyurl.com/muj8bbt.

After a few years, we launched a full scale Guerilla Marketing company called “GoGorilla Media”, which is still alive and well and based in Manhattan. Our website iswww.GoGorillaAdvertising.com. Click on the press section of the site to see more articles of what we’ve been up to these past 17 years.

In between creating ad campaigns for major brands, I’ve squeezed in a few fun projects like teaching Advertising 101 at New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT), writing and self-publishing a book on financial education for children called “Moneyology.” Click here to download a full pdf copy of the book for free:http://tinyurl.com/nz84l6z.

One of my hobbies is writing essays and here is a link to some essays I wrote about various topics, from Homeschooling to Bitcoin to Obamacare to “Why Reality Sucks”:www.medium.com/@alanwolan